


Like The Dawn

by holdingtorches



Category: British Actor RPF
Genre: Comfort, Confession, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-02-06 15:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12820620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holdingtorches/pseuds/holdingtorches
Summary: Tom goes through a bad breakup, and you do your best to comfort him.





	Like The Dawn

“Hey,” you spoke softly as you opened the door that lead to the roofdeck. You had followed him there soon after he had emerged from his room, looking like a husk of himself after his whirlwind romance of a few months had come to its apocalypse when the girl he was dating had soullessly broken it off through the phone. **  
**

But you just didn’t understand  _why_. The years had seen the way he loved others; he loved to the point that the subject of his affections would want for nothing. Indeed, his love was the kind wherein one’s cup runneth over, as he showered whoever his current girl was with genuine kindness and affection. And he never stopped showing it, often going out of his way to conduct some crazily romantic (and often swoon-worthy) act of love. He was a romantic at heart, and his love was purely selfless. You of all people understood that he had his flaws, but never enough to merit  _this_.

And so you found yourself with a hot Thermos full of tomato soup, a box of tissues, and a warm blanket in hand. You closed the door with your foot and walked on over to him. Unfurling the blanket, you draped it on his shoulders and sat beside him, mimicking how he had sat with his legs stretched out in front of him on the cold tile floor.

“Beloved, I…” he began, sounding like a child who didn’t know how to explain the havoc he had wreaked while his mother was away.

You pursed your lips slightly as he spoke the nickname you called each other. The nickname had come from a reference long lost, forgotten by both history and memory. But it stuck, and it worked; it worked its three syllables of endless meaning into the dreams you would dream of him turning around to face you, bathed in the muted sunlight that streamed across your bed as his eyes blinked sleep away to gaze at you. In his eyes was a sea of love, gleaming and resonating in a way that enthralled you for all you were worth. “Beloved,” he would whisper in your dreams, his lips forming a warm smile as his hands reached for you beneath the sheets you shared to curve the curves of your body on him and remind you again and again of a reality in which you were loved… by him.

But that was all they were.  _Dreams_.

You weren’t lovers; you were friends.

Best friends.

And the nickname served as a gentle reminder of the fact that sometimes the same thing could mean different worlds to other people. To him, you didn’t know what. But to you, it was the subtle calling of a yearning soul, using ambiguity to confess that which the heart couldn’t bring itself to say on its own.

“Talk to me,” you said, breaking yourself from your reverie to pour hot soup from the Thermos you brought. The soup formed wisps of steam in the cold night air, and his hands took the cup from yours graciously. He put the cup to his lips and drank until a soft, sad smile found its way on his thin lips. As you watched some colour return to his face, you promised yourself that tonight was not going to be about you; looking at his eyes gave you the feeling that he wasn’t living, but rather seeking to live.

“I don’t know, Beloved,” he eventually said, his hands cradling the cup as he stared at the London skyline. He looked like he had been crying all day, but his eyes still looked glassy as the city lights danced on the tears that threatened to spill.

“I gave her my all, you know that,” he continued, his voice starting to grow thick. You nodded and smiled softly, a smile he did not see; of course you knew. The giddy calls to the florist’s to deliver her bouquet upon bouquet of roses, the arrangements he had made to row her around The Serpentine after that dinner he had booked weeks in advance. The champagne, the chocolates, everything; for the past few months you had watched on as he practically ran around the house you rented with him, making preparations here and confirming plans there, with you secretly wishing that you were the recipient of these affections. “…and I know that everything I’ve done doesn’t necessitate that she should love me back. I’m not that kind of person, Beloved, you know that. I know that if being loved is your only goal, you will fail to achieve it. But throughout it all, even before my ‘schemes’, as you call them, she just felt so distant, so disinterested, in the love I had to give, in  _me_.” His voice broke its banks, and he shifted to lay his head down on your lap to weep.

And for a while, that’s how it sorted out: you, sitting in silence with your hand running through his hair to help him calm down as he cried, cup of soup forgotten as he spilled his guts out to you. As his tears formed dark pools on your jeans, a wall of emotions hit you like a riptide: compassion, sadness, jealousy.

You ran your hand through his hair again as you tapped his waist gently, trying your best to console him. Despite his sullen face, he was still so Beautiful. In that moment, despite the sorrow that linked you two, you couldn’t help but notice his Beauty. Hell, you couldn’t even begin to describe his Beauty because plain words couldn’t bring justice to his luminous colours. In your eyes, his Beauty was not in his Greek god’s face but in the virtue of kindness that emanated from it; his Beauty was not in his lithe body but in the soul that animated it, burning like the sun in the zenith of its course. His Beauty lay not in his sharp cheekbones or his eyes the colour of the seas that landlocked lovers yearned to find. No, he was Beautiful not only because of his form but also because of his discerning, understanding intellect and gentle, kind soul, both of which never failed to think of others before himself. It was why you loved him. Still.

And so your sorrow soon became seething wrath at  _her_ , she who couldn’t see the blessing given to her, she who cast away the man who let you know heaven’s key through his laughter, she who utterly shattered the one you held dearest. He didn’t notice how the hand running through his curls stopped as you clenched your jaw, stopping yourself and your sharp tongue from adding insult to injury by defaming the girl who was the very reason he was suffering.

“I guess I fell too soon. I barely knew her and went all the way,” he said, sniffling as his crying died down, breaking the white hot fury that had clutched your mind. “I wonder if she loved me. I knew I did, or at least, I believe I did. And so I did everything she had asked of me, regardless if I had truly wanted to or not. I thought that if I stuck my neck out, I’d get her out of her shell.”

You looked down at the boy lying down on your lap, your wide, astonished eyes meeting his puffy ones. “Don’t look at me like that, I want to know what’s on your brain,” he said, looking up to you as a laugh slightly coloured his voice.

“And yet when you stuck your neck out, she executed you, like a lamb to the slaughter,” you spoke softly, your eyes avoiding his by staring into the lights of the city that shouldn’t be awake. You didn’t see him press his lips together in a hard line as your perspective of reality started to dawn on him.

“I don’t think she ever loved you,  _Beloved_ ,” you continued, emphasising your last word for ‘no apparent reason’. “You went in all the way. And it’s not a bad thing, I assure you, because I’m sure you chose to put yourself into this and give it your 110%. But you chose the wrong person to pull your 110% on; you loved her to the point that she didn’t have to love you in return, and you gave yourself to her to the point that you lost who you actually are in what she wanted you to be. She said she loved you, but the love she gave you didn’t let you  _live_. She used you for her own games; she saw your willingness to give her your everything and she exploited it for her gain and no one else’s. That,  _Beloved_ ¸ is not love.”

A wailing siren blared through the crisp and frigid air, and the serene quality of the moment made you chuckle silently, a subtle movement in your diaphragm that he felt as well.

“Well, don’t trust me on that. Ralph had said I didn’t know what love was, remember?” you said, a grin erupting on your face as you remembered the folly of your youth when you had pursued someone who deserved less than you.

“Yeah, well, he was a bitch,” the boy in your lap replied. You laughed out loud, his childish tone of grumpiness being way too hilarious for you. He eventually started laughing as well, and soon his neck was bent back on the curve of your thigh as laughter gripped him.

“What is love, then, Beloved?” he eventually asked as the laughter started to ebb away.

“You know what I tell you about love, Tom, I tell you all the time,” you sigh as your hand found its way into his hair again, while the other reached for the soup he had neglected.

“Love…,” you began, sighing as you tried to find the words. “Love isn’t effortless, I’ll give you that much – it’s effort _ful_. The thing about it, I believe, is that we don’t have to love; we choose to. It’s that moment you sit yourself down and make that decision that you will actively bring another person into your life. It requires and involves two;  _not one_ , Tom, _like what you were with her_ ,” you said through gritted teeth. “Two, Tom. Love is what makes it possible to see the world from the viewpoint of  _two_ , not one. It’s not about two people simply meeting one day and developing a relationship that looks deeper and deeper into nothing but themselves. It’s making a new life not just on your own but with a new pair of eyes and hands to guide you. It’s knowing what the world is like when you experience it and build on it and live for it from the point of view of difference rather than your own identity. Love is – oh Beloved, forgive me, I’m launching into a soliloquy.”

“It’s alright,” he assured you. “I haven’t heard you speak in a while, O Grand Elder.” He chuckled slightly as he spoke, and you found yourself a little happy that he was slowly becoming less dejected.

“Oh shut up, Tom,” you said, smiling as you slapped his arm. He laughed a bit as sat up to sit beside you again. He turned to you, his face regaining seriousness as his gaze made you lose your train of thought for a while, until you found your words again.

“Love is a project. Forgive me, it’s not  _a_ project, it’s  _the_ project. It’s an existential project; Love is two different people constructing the world from a decentred perspective that is more than that of your own impulse to survive or re-affirm who you are or what you’re worth. You construct it from the ground up, which is why its foundations can’t be shaky.

“It’s not a feeling, and I get so triggered when people think that it’s purely a feeling only to ultimately forsake their relationships. They say that ‘the spark is gone’ and I hate that because it’s an insult to what love is. It’s so offensive to love itself when we relegate it to something as inconstant as a feeling. It’s a choice. We choose the people we love, we choose the people we let in and affect us. And choice requires a strong rationale and unwavering assurance that we made the right choice, in the sense that we take a person’s everything into consideration, acknowledge the risks, and know that despite these risks, you’re still willing to love the Other, baggage and all. Love, I believe, is chance and absolute randomness that becomes destiny through choice. We need our heads on straight when embarking on a decision as life-changing as love because love isn’t just about fun and games. It’s about riding it out when things get tougher than we are.

“And that foundation I was talking about earlier? Reason is required for something that’s meant to stand the test of time. Emotions are turbulent and transient, and love cannot thrive in such conditions. Love requires the calmness of choice and the assurance of rationality.”

The air was thick with silence as your words treaded heavily in his brain. You didn’t want to give your feelings away, and so your gaze wandered through the azimuth of lights that twinkled from the distance.

Suddenly, church bells began to ring, signalling the arrival of midnight. But to Tom, the tolling of the bells heralded an epiphany, ushering in an enlightenment that shattered him only to form his soul anew. You didn’t see how he looked at you with wide eyes, his mouth agape as your words set in to shake his being. Like the dawn, you had awakened a whole new world inside of him, a world filled with goodness and wonder. In his eyes, you were a prophet of love, speaking from the literal rooftops of a foretaste of the real thing. In your chattiness, you had slipped into his soul and illumined him.

“I suppose at the end of the day, love is…” You stumbled, losing all previous eloquence as you tried your best to sum up your monologue. “…love is when you want someone to grow into a better person and be happy. In wanting that for someone, you extend the walls you may have created for yourself, reaching out to your other until your boundaries ultimately thin out and stretch. You see a world beyond yourself through love; you see a world that, despite its flaws, is still beautiful and still full of good things. Through the force that love is, you venture past yourself to meet the powers that created you. And once you get there, it’s not an intersection that you meet once and never see again; it’s something that you’ll always have.”

You breathed in deep as your lengthy monologue had finally ended. Gathering the courage to face him, you turned to look at him, only to find him his eyes filled with wonder and an undiscernible emotion, looking at you as he exhaled through parted lips. You looked away as soon as your eyes met his; his gaze made you beyond embarrassed, your cheeks turning as red as the tomato soup you had brought for him. You didn’t know how in his eyes, you gleamed with light, a divine apparition of Aphrodite in the accidents of the senses and corporal flesh, finally revealing what love is to the dirty gem of a city you lived in, to the world… to him.

And he was honoured to be basking in that glow.

“Do you love me, beloved?” he finally asked.

Your eyes widened at the question, your breath hitching in your throat. For years and years, the torch you held out for him had reluctantly shrunk into candlelight as he put himself out there into the world and came across the beautiful, the damned, and the ones that walked the fine line in between the two. But with those four words, the hearth in your heart had roared back up again, singing with passion after ages of neglect.

“Tom, I… I always have. I’m your best friend, remember?” you replied, trying your best to quell the roaring in your heart and the singing in your veins.

        He sighed your name, taking your cheek in his palm as he made you face him. You felt your cheeks burn even warmer against his touch, and he shifted to lean closer to your seated form, his free arm behind you, supporting his weight.

“No, beloved, I mean beyond that.”

An aeroplane flew far above your heads, its silhouette looking like an errant shooting star. And so you wished, wishing for the courage to tell him what you had always wanted to say.

“I do, Tom. I… I love you. It’s not just in the Platonic sense of the word, no.” His pupils grew wider as the last sentence parted from your lips. “I love you without counting the cost, without heeding the wounds that may come, without seeking for rest, without asking for reward or recompense, save that of knowing that in my love for you, you become better and happier as a person. As  _you_ ; not as someone else in light of how others try to change you with the love they try to steal, but who  _you_ are, the you that you ever so honestly bared to me in the years I have come to know your sweet mind and radiant soul. You have made me into such a better person, and I thank you so much for that. I know you don’t need my gratitude, but I just thought I’d let you know. Thank you, Beloved. You are the words on my tongue to my favourite song. You are the brightest shade of sun I had ever seen. I… I love you.”

        You would’ve turned your head away, but with his hand curved to hold your cheek, you just couldn’t. Instead, you averted your eyes, your lips pursing together nervously as you felt the dreaded feeling of foreboding rejection creep up behind you. Filling yourself up with courage borrowed from God knows where, you looked back at him to find his eyes transfixed onto you, his breath shaky as his gaze spoke of tremendous fascination and gentle rapture.

        And all of a sudden there was nothing but fire, his lips pressed against you as his hands roamed through your hair before gripping onto your waist and laying you back. Lying down, you felt the soft force of his kiss even more, his mouth moving warmly against yours in the frigid London night air. You hands found their way to his curls that you loved so much as he broke the kiss to whisper your name like a prayer, only to kiss you again as his hands traced through your body, leaving trails of fire in their wake as he gripped you close with tender ardour.

He pulled back before laying on his side, his hand propping his head up as he gazed at you lovingly, his free arm drawing you closer to him. A soft smile curved itself on his lips as he watched you calm down, your lungs heaving as your eyes looked up at the night sky, blown wide with exhilaration.

“Beloved…” he began, calling out to you when he thought you were calm enough. You turned your head to look at him and shifted on your side to huddle closer, colouring his cheeks with a delicious shade of muted red. Amused, you turned your attention to his hair, playing with it as you pulled on his curls and watched them bounce back. A soft laugh came from him as you did so, and his hand curved itself on your waist, reigniting that soft warmth you had felt with his lips.

“Hmmmm?” you replied dreamily, still high from just experiencing the kiss you had dreamt of for years now.

Tom breathed in, seemingly hoping to gain courage through respiration. “Could you… would you show me what love is?”

“Always, Tom. Always,” you whispered, melting into his embrace.

You spent the rest of the evening watching the planes fly over London Town with him, conversing about pretty much anything as you stayed cosy under the blanket you brought and sipping the soup that had somehow remained hot through all of that. Before you knew it, the dawn peeked through the horizon, waking up the world with its soft glow.

As you looked at each other, your faces illuminated in the sunrise, you knew that in the love that was growing more and more between you both, you could stay.

* * *

It’s been a year since then. You’re sat in the same roofdeck as you once were, still with blankets, still with soup. But some things were different: Tom had decked the roofdeck out with fairy lights, adding pillows into the mix but the both of you were two entirely different people compared to the ones that were there on that fateful night of being lost and eventually being found. He’s leaning against you now, lips absentmindedly kissing the back of your hand as your fingers intertwine with his. He disengages his hands from yours to cup your face in his large palm, giving you a chance to look into his eyes. Looking deep, you could see the Tom you had sat with the year before; you could still see the breaks that his history had lashed out onto him. However, there was solid gold where the hollow cracks once were, and you could see his soul shining through despite the pain.

“Bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh, at last,” he whispered, kissing your cheek softly as his arms wrapped around you. You felt joy swell in your heart, closing your eyes and leaning into his chest. Hearing his heartbeat, the movie in your mind that you had created over the past year started playing underneath your eyelids. His body leaned into your touch as you smiled into his embrace, burying your face in his arm, overjoyed in knowing that some way, somehow, it was love between you two; love, at long last, was not merely glimpsed to be lost again, but finally attained forever.


End file.
